The specification relates to generating a reputation score for a user in a social network that measures the trustworthiness of the user by processing user interactions associated with the user from data sources.
The trustworthiness of a social network user becomes more and more important as people rely on the internet as a source for legitimate information. For example, people want to know if an owner of an online store is honest and trustworthy in order to determine whether to purchase an item from the store. One way to help indicate the trustworthiness of the user is to generate a score for the user that measures the trustworthiness of the social network user.
It is difficult to determine whether a user is trustworthy by his or her online activities. For example, if the user posts a comment for an item, it is difficult to determine whether the user is a spammer, misinformed or untrustworthy based on the content in the comment. In addition, scoring systems have difficulty distinguishing between users and bots or spam when scoring user interactions.